Abstract
UNDER the heading “Links with the Past,” several letters were published in The Times rather more than a year ago in which the writers gave instances of human longevity, showing how in certain cases a chain of a very few individuals suffices to connect the present with a comparatively remote past. One writer, for example, said that his grandmother, who died about forty years ago, used to boast that her grandfather was twelve years old when Charles I. was beheaded. Striking as such instances are when applied to man, on the other hand they serve to illustrate the relative insignificance of the length of time represented by human lives as con trasted with the duration of many forest trees. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that a single oak tree may form a link between the present day and the Norman Conquest; a very short series of ancestors suffices to carry us back to the days when the progress of the Roman invaders was seriously impeded by dense forests, which have long since disappeared, and farther back to the age of Neolithic man, whose flint implements are occasionally met with in the submerged forests round our coasts.
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Links with the Past in the Plant World 1 . Nature 87, 502–506 (1911). https://doi.org/10.1038/087502a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/087502a0